Frontline Conversations & Systemic Response: COVID19

In this episode, co-hosts Drs. Laurie Charlés and Saliha Bava talk about teams, and how we are in leadership with each other and with ourselves as citizens, mental health professionals, and as family members. We discuss how the nature of what we are all experiencing is extraordinary, and the mutual sharing of that awareness with each other can have so much value. “This comes from our systemic training.”

“I’m discovering so many cool things people are doing.” We talk about how in an emergency response we must strive to work in ways that are constantly mindful of matching the actual needs of people on the ground with the attempts that we make to meet those needs, with Saliha reflecting on a memorable moment in a shelter during her response to Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005, and Laurie reflecting on a “Lessons Learned” conference on MHPSS response in Liberia in 2015, one year into the international response to the 2014 Ebola Virus Disease outbreak. Remembering to ask “learning questions” about how we are responding to hardship, alongside and at the same time as the actual moment of the response, in situ, is a critical way to operate during emergencies, and something many systemic folks would recognize as reflexivity.

CREDIT: Music: Gus Greene | Cover Art: Mark Greene

In this first episode of Frontline Conversations: Systemic Response, Drs. Saliha Bava and Laurie Charlés discuss some of the origins of the podcast, including their professional experiences as consultants, trainers, and also, as volunteers, working in complex, humanitarian contexts, public health emergencies of international concern, and disaster settings, in the U.S. and across different parts of the globe.

“We are all called to respond.” “We are all having to lead.”

We discuss how the pandemic, still in its early days, has already had a profound change on families and on the world, requiring all of us to make changes in our lives as we are each called to find ways to adapt to support ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities in the face of so many new challenges, including but certainly not limited to infection prevention and control (IPC). Such adaptations are necessary in emergencies, as our various structures disappear or collapse, forcing us to create new jointly arranged, planned, and coordinated efforts to maintain our connections, perhaps even heightening them in useful, innovative, and virtual ways. We focus on versions prep and check-ins along with a live consult of integrating mental health within an emerging virtual response community.

Relevant Sources from Ideas Mentioned

• Gregory Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays In Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, And Epistemology https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3620295.html
• Forwarding Family Therapy Leadership in Global Mental Health Laurie L. Charlés & Saliha Bava March 8, 2019 AAMFT Leadership Symposium Washington, D.C. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332513187_Forwarding_Family_Therapy_Leadership_in_Global_Mental_Health_Laurie_L_Charles_Saliha_Bava_March_8_2019_AAMFT_Leadership_Symposium_Washington_DC    
• Charlés, L. & Bava, S. (in press). “Family Therapy & Global Mental Health: Reflections on Professional Development and Training.”In M. Rastogi & R. Singhe (Volume Editors; K. Wampler Series Editor), Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy, Volume IV. Wiley: NY.

CREDIT: Music: Gus Greene | Cover Art: Mark Greene